Bees Saal Baad

Pavan and I celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary recently.  Like most loving couples out there, I wish I could write a sweet, rosy, gushy description of our wedded life and call him puppy names. Haaaah! But that’s not me and that’s not our story.

The name of the horror thriller Indian movie, “Bees Saal Baad” suits more aptly to our journey together of twenty years. The thing about Indian Horror movies is that you tend to laugh more than you actually feel scared, so you get the idea why I chose this title.

For those who don’t know, ours is an interstate or more appropriately cross country love marriage with Pavan being from Hyderabad and me from Chandigarh. The bride was fair and lovely and the groom was dark and handsome (at least we were 20 years ago).  Pavan was the geeky Developer and I was the star Tester finding bugs in the code that he had written. I was immature, lost, brash and pretty. He was grounded, soft spoken, hardworking and messy. The caricatures above were hand drawn by a graphic artist, a good friend, who worked in the same office as both of us.

My sole reason for falling in love with Pavan was the reason that he loved me more than anyone had ever loved me. Till date, I don’t see a reason what made him fall in love with someone who was constantly finding defects in his work. Most other developers in the team used to hate me and argue with me over the defects that I had shared. But not Pavan. He always promised to check the bug out, in the hope of improving his code. I guess this should have been another reason to fall in love with him, but I didn’t consider it at that time.

This year, when I realized it was our twentieth, I was shaken a little. I couldn’t believe we had survived 20 years together! Wow! That is so surreal. Him and Me, Me and Him together for 20 years, who would have thought! What all we have done and where all we have been. We have tried to change each other and failed. We have tried to become like the other and failed. We have tried to let each other live their own life and failed at that too. The beauty is that in-spite of failing for 20 years, we still haven’t given up hope of trying to fit in better with each other.

We simply refuse to give up on each other. After so many years of trying, we know there is hope. There is hope we will change the world for the better (I mean each others’ world). I have hope that one day, he will manage to lose weight. He has hope that one day, I will learn to control my temper. I have hope that he will become less of a workaholic and spend more time with family. He has hope that I will stop pestering the family and get a real life project to divert my energies. I have hope that he will stop snoring. He has hope that I will start sleeping more soundly so I don’t hear his snores. As they say, our small world is built on solid foundation of Hope.

This is our short story of twenty years. I haven’t been able to decide who is the Beauty and who is the Beast, or more appropriately who is the Ghost and who is the Protagonist  in our Horror Comic Story. I guess we just have to live together for another 20 years to figure it out. Stick around if you want to uncover the suspense!

Cheers to the next 20!